Thanks to the wonders of the internet I recently acquired one of those cheap Mills Creek DVD box sets "100 Horror Classics". Let's see how many of the pictures I'll actually watch.
And what better way to begin this little experiment could there be than watching one of Bela Lugosi's poverty row films, the idiotic but charming The Devil Bat.
Bela plays "kindly Doctor" Paul Carruthers who moonlights as perfumer and mad scientist. Feeling betrayed by the business partners who made a fortune out of one of his fragrant inventions, he decides on a logical course of revenge: To let a bat grow enormously by treating it with electrical mad science thingies and persuade his victims to test "a new shaving lotion", whose smell drives the bat to kill them.
Given the brilliance of this plan, the stupidity of the victims and Bela's incredibly insincere kindness, nothing could possibly go wrong, if not for an annoying reporter and his even more annoying side kick.
Until Bela finds his (totally undeserved) end, he treats us to many fine moments of evil grinning and glaring, even a little evil speechifying. Sadly, not so much with the cackling.
I felt highly entertained anyway.
Darling of the Day:
Tell me, Doc - how did you develop a monster bat like that?
You wouldn't understand the scientific theory!
Thursday, April 3, 2008
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